User:10000BL/Reel Food

Title: Reel Food

Artist: Anne L. Bower

Published: 2004

Annotation:

Chapter 1: Watching Food: The production of food, film and values - Anne L. Bower

Film about food where main character is a chef/cook: Big Night (1995), Babette's Feast (1987), Chocolat (1989).
Movie in which food formulates a dominant symbol system in Blow-Out/ La Grande Bouffe (1973).
Often filmmakers in all film genres turn to food to communicate important aspects of characters' emotions, along with their personal and cultural identities.
Concepts like ethnic, religious, sexual and philosophical aspects of narratives are communicated through food.
A movie most people don't place under the food genre: The Hours (2002). Yet 3 woman (Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, Clarissa Vaughan) deal in each of their ways with their lives that is conveyed through food (WATCH!!). The each use or are in relation with food that either 'weerspiegelt', 'belichaamt' their personal life (metaphors).

Woolf: Has servants that make the food, distant relationship with servants, sometimes rejecting food so she can concentrate on writing her novel. We could say her separation from food indicates both her dedication to her art (the 'high art' of literature would have been, in her early-twentieth-century world, quite opposed to the 'low art' of food preparation), but also her tenuous hold on life.
Laura: suburban 1950s housewife spends a great deal of her day making a birthday cake for her husband, a cake that must be perfect. It seems that this cake, presented at day's end to the husband back from a busy day in the city, is summation of her being - pretty, iced, ready to be consumed. We know that she is much more than her cake, but Laura hasn't yet found a way to put that on the table.
Clarissa: editor that throws a party for her former lover Richard. Clarrisa insists to make a special crab dish herself, it is Richards favourite. For this woman, as opposed to Woolf and Laura, creating and sharing fine food is an enjoyable and even artistic activity. Her way of working is psychological realism, preparing the food, chatting with the new boyfriend of Richard as if she is perfectly in control yet at the same time she represses a variety of feelings: Love and sorrow for her dying friend, jealously that Richard rejected her for someone else. After Richard has committed suicide, there's a moment when the camera focuses on food sliding off platters into a garbage can as Clarissa, her lover Sally and he daughter clean up the banquet that was abandoned. Beautiful, expensive, celebratory food become slop, indicating the sense of waste and loss Clarissa feels at this point - losing Richard, the love they'd shared, and perhaps even a part of herself.

In 'The Hours', the filmmaker draws on the tradition of using food and drink as 'symbols of life and sensuality'. In this film, as in many others that are not central about food, we can see that food is still 'an essential element', one that, being so very ordinary, 'the audience experiences rather than understands'.
Food has been part of film since films began, yet only recently have we given extended attention to the many and sometimes startling ways that food functions in movies. Food, I contend, is part of the semiotic process of filmmaking, and Reel Food provides new insights into this complex signifying system, involving what is eaten, not eaten, thrown away, preserved, chopped, baked, shared, hoarded, cooked from scratch, taken from a can, or stolen.
Twenty years ago Teresa de ?Lauretis helped us understand that cinema is directly implicated in the production and reproduction of meanings, values, and ideology in both sociality and subjectivity. There are many studies that investigate aspects of film like clothing, music etc. What about the recurrent use of food? Food has such powerful representational, metaphoric and even narrative power. According to Gary Poole: it is possible to say things with food - resentment, love., compensation, anger, rebellion, withdrawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor of subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit, but surprisingly varied, strong and sometimes violent or subversive. ---> Gary Pool - Reel meals, set meals: food in film and theatre (1999).
Symbolic meaning of food is often visible also in other forms of visual arts/paitings: Bacchus and grapes and other luscious fruits signaling pleasures. Still lifes that say something about the time, class status (exotic items from far), values, mortality (by inclusion flies for example that eat the food).
Visual artists use food partly because it is such a common element of their world.
Food is part of the way that, for over a century now, movies have been telling us who we are, constructing our economic and political aspirations; our sense of sexual, national, and etnic identity; filling our minds with ideas about love and romance, innocence and depravity, adventure, bravery, cruelty, hope and despair.
For many of us, new technologies are unsettling. Part of how we become more comfortable with and accepting of a quickly changing world (not only the technologies themselves, but their impacts on our lives - from changing weather patterns to communications styles to employment systems), is through the representations various media offer us. Consciously or unconsciously, we use cinema, for instance, to familiarize ourselves with strange and new elements of society. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz: with the advent of a chaotic and diffuse urban culture, the 'real' could increasingly be grasped only through its representations. Part of the 'real' we grasp is in food imagery.
But wether food is coded negatively or positively, wether it plays a major or a minor role, it is often a major ingredient in the cinematic experience.
In movies of the past and present, viewers' group and/or individual identities are acted upon, reinforced, or perhaps reformed based on national, generational, gender or other ideologies. Movie characters perform behaviours on the big screen that we will cheer or boo, imitate or avoid. And a surprisingly large part of what allows our (dis)identifications is mediated through food, its sensuality pulling us into film scenes.
Fried green tomatoes (19910, Soul Food (1997), Tortilla soup (2001): the visceral reactions these movies produce affect viewers' emotional and intellectual reactions to the cultural issues highlighted by the characters and their conflicts. Even among viewers who don't share the ethnic or regional roots important to these films, many will find themselves experiencing a nostalgia for the kind of family or group solidarity that comes through the sharing of foodways.
In any film genre, as Will Rocket explains, there is a recurring pattern of story and situation (syntax or structure) and characters and iconography (semantic elements) that appear repeatedly throughout the body of films that make up a genre, doing so often enough to constitute dramatic conventions; this generates audience expectations that encourage their attendance. To be culturally literate means to share in the conventions of particular genres--> to understand or know what kind of elements will be shown/seen. (e.g. vampire films, blood, no sunlight etc).
But even as a genre emerges, so do variations and genres go through cycles leading from innovation to emulation to exhaustion. At the present moment, I would say the food film genre is in the emulation stage; wether it can maintain itself through variation and invention or wether it will soon exhaust itself remains to be seen.
What are the conventions within the merging 'food film' genre? Food plays a keyrole in the film, wether or not the main character is a chef or not. This means that often the camera will focus in on food preparation and presentation so that in closeups or panning shots, food fills the screen. The restaurant kitchen, the dining room and/or kitchen of a home, tables within a restaurant, a shop in which food is made and/or sold, will usually be central settings. And the film's narrative line will consistently depict characters negotiating questions of identity, power, culture, class, spirituality, or relationship through food.
What is and what isn't within the genre of food film is subjective.
Some films use food in a symbolic way as part of the setting and character conflicts. So even though it might not be a food movie it can depends on food's symbolic power in communicating class structure and social status.
Whether films fall into the food film genre or simply make effective use of food as a communicative element, we see that both what is and what isn't eaten have meaning - defining characters as purists, compromisers, gluttons, ghouls; as rejectors or acceptors of some cultural element (from aging to ethnicity, from class to gender identification, and so forth). Food as stand-in for or axxomplice to sex is also soemthing we easily 'read' in films, as is a large meal as a sign of connection and communion, wether within a family, a religious community, a carnival or a journey. Food, we also understand, can script traditional roles (the mother in the kitchen), or indicate dysfunction (food spoiled, badly cooked, poisoned, poorly chosen, vomited or simply refused). Food can tell us about characters' abject poverty or egregious consumption, about their health or dissipation.
Indeed the essays in Reel Food make clear that the consumption of food can stand for consumption of any aspect of culture - whether cultural traditions, cultural hybridity, the hyperconsumerism of our postmodern Western world, or some aspect of gender conflict or definition. Food in films can allow filmmakers to comment on the very role of the filmmaker as a creator of culture. Vb. Eat Drink Man Woman (Throughout this movie, food preparation dominaes over scenes of actual eating and one comes to realize that what is actually being prepared is more than food - it is traditional Chinese culture itself.
Summary in book
This movie hardly questions the morals and values of its central character. The language of the movie is Chinese, all the characters are Chinese, and almost all of the food is traditional Chinese, prepared and cooked in tradtional ways, using typical Chinese implements, serving dishes, and tableware. The film, then, can be understood as a production that honors and represents Lee's cultural heritage.
The 2001 film Tortilla Soup based very closely on Eat Drink Man Woman, uses the same story to different effect. In this case, director Ripoll incorporates a number of traditional values that we find in Lee's film - the need to stick with family, the ritual of sunday dinner as a locus of both family joy and conflict, the absolute loyalty to heterosexuality and the creativity of a complex cuisine that is very much an art. However, Ripoll overturns traditions when it comes to matters of national cuisine and cultural homogeneity.
In Tortilla Soup the many shots of food preparation have the same sensory beauty, precision, and artistry as in Eat Drink Man Woman, though obviously the food itself is very different.
It is the movie's end that most powerfully brings out its difference from Eat Drink Man Woman relative to many aspects of cultural formation. In this movie, the daughter's version of a standard recipe represents a necessary renewal of culture through artistic variation and generational change.
Summary in book
By giving us mixtures of foods and languages, along with showing major changes for female characters, filmmaker Ripoll indicates that, in her view, a culture must embrace change in order to thrive.
Food as a powerfull semiotic system that effectively communicates ideas about cultural formation and identity.

Reel Food's first section contains 7 essays that consider the many ways that food has been used to represent and formulate national and ethnic identity within movies.
The second section presents 5 very different explorations of food's symbolic power to shape film representations of gender issues, including sexual power, eating disorders, gender equity, female spirituality and more.
Third section turns readers' attention primarily to movies most viewers wold not classify within the food film genre. This group of essays investigates the amazing range of films in which food performs key roles, often in unorthodox or even shocking ways. As the essays make clear, horror, science fiction, gangster movies, and slapstick comedies all deploy food to create apsects of their narratives, symbols, characterizations, and visual motifs. In addtion, food's sensuality and theatricality (a meal can be quite a production), along with our assumptions about what is and what is not to be eaten, mean that food in films can produce in viewers very strong, visceral reactions.
Essay about what moviegoing means, physical location, foods served at the movies.